Anna Resurget

A while back I showed a picture of Samuel and Anna playing an Indonesian game where you have to tie a string around your waist, hang a pencil from the string behind you, and then try to lower the pencil into a bottle strategically placed beneath you.  I have often wondered if it is a form of Indonesian potty training.  If you’ve been there, you understand.  In the comments to that post, someone asked me if it was the “eel in the bottle” game they had heard me mention previously.

No, it is not the “eel in the bottle.”  Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a brief excerpt of the Eel Relay.

Samuel has asked:

I have found that God is all one thing or all the other except on one occasion.  This occasion is anger.  God is either one thing (on) or the other (off).  He is never in the middle except in anger.  He says to be slow to anger (the one exception) and abounding in love (on).  I think that we should be the same way.  Not only slow to anger and abounding in love, but in all areas of life.  Let me know what you think about this.

He is asking some thoughtful questions.  Check out his blog, Making Waves, to comment there.

Last night I was going through some old photos from our first year in Indonesia.  I looked at some of the brief videos we made with our little Kodak digital camera.  I will try to share some of these as we go along.  Here was one of Anna reading a book to me before her bedtime.  She is reading Angelina Ballerina and you can see me holding her Angelina doll in my lap.  Anna was four at the time.  The sound is a little rough at the beginning, but it seems to clear up toward the end.  Enjoy.

No Comment Needed

I recently learned of a new blog that you all need to check out.  It is called Making Waves and is designed as a place for discussion of important themes.  The creator of the blog, a fine young man from Wake Forest, NC, is choosing a topic for each week.  The initial topic is the issue of panhandling.  Check it out, but if you do, be sure you put your comments into the discussion!

I returned from chapel not long ago.  Alvin Reid preached a great sermon that all youth pastors or student ministers need to hear.  You can find it at the SEBTS website.

At the service we sang an old hymn, Jesus Paid It All.  As is often my custom now, I changed the first person pronouns to third person pronouns and sang the hymn from Anna’s perspective rather than from my own.  This hymn may be the most simple and poignant statement about Anna’s sin while living, her faith in Jesus while still living, and her praise of him now as she awaits his return and the future resurrection of her body.

She heard the Savior say,
“Thy strength indeed is small;
Child of weakness, watch and pray,
Find in Me thine all in all.”

Jesus paid it all,
All to Him she owes;
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow.

For nothing good had she
Whereby Thy grace to claim;
She washed her garments white
In the blood of Calv’ry’s Lamb.

And now complete in Him,
Her robe, His righteousness,
Close sheltered ’neath His side,
She is divinely blest.

Lord, now indeed she finds
Thy pow’r, and Thine alone,
Can change the leper’s spots
And melt the heart of stone.

When from her dying bed
Her ransomed soul did rise,
“Jesus died my soul to save,”
Did rend the vaulted skies.

And when before the throne
She stands in Him complete,
She lays her trophies down,
All down at Jesus’ feet.

A funny memory came up today.

A few posts back I wrote about my Aunt Alice passing away and about the brief relationship between her and Anna.  I mentioned in that post that my Aunt Alice was living the life that Anna would have loved–the elderly widow or spinster.  Some of you who knew Anna might remember, however, that Anna wanted to have 17 children.  But the unmarried spinster life would not allow her to have 17 children.

One day she was telling me about her future and she began to name off her 17 children.  She had told me that she did not want to get married, and so I quietly informed her that she would have to get married before she could have 17 children.  She looked at me, a bit peeved at my insolence, sighed, and said, “Well, if I have to, but men are just tools in order to have children.”  I did not pursue it further.

(Update: I have added a photo of the original tea party for those who don’t know about it. See below.)

I just received word yesterday that my Aunt Alice passed away some time on Tuesday night.  She had been battling various forms of cancer for some time.  The decision had been made to put her on hospice care and they had just brought her home from the hospital, but as with my mom, she passed away much more quickly than anyone imagined.

I will have to dig around and see if I have a picture of Anna with my Aunt Alice.  Anna met her on a trip we made to Southern California in January 2007.  We spent the night at her house on our way to Disneyland.  Anna fell in love with her Great-aunt Alice and I think the feeling was mutual.  I think that Aunt Alice was living the kind of life that Anna would like.  By the time Anna met her she was already widowed after the death of my Uncle Tom several years earlier.  So Anna only knew my aunt as a sort of spinster, living on her own in a beautiful house with lots of books.  It might have been the books that attracted them to one another.  They both loved to read and I think it pleased Anna to meet an older woman who enjoyed reading as much as she did.  And Aunt Alice was very generous giving many books to Anna.

Alice was not part of the original tea party at my mom and dad’s house, with my mom and Timberley and Anna.  I am certain, however, that if such things happen in heaven, Anna will have pulled up a chair for Aunt Alice alongside my mom’s chair and asked in a very proper British accent, “Would you care for some tea, Ma’am?”